I’m back in Vienna for another one-month intensive German class. Classes are held right across the street from the Staatsoper on the Ringstraße, and if I arrive a bit early, I sometimes kill time in Schiller Platz (there’s a statue of Schiller) in front of the Academy of Fine Arts. Despite it being within a stone’s throw of perhaps the most prominent street in town, many Major Tourist Attractions, and next to a big hotel, it’s usually fairly quiet. Except for dog walkers and pigeons. I was watching the pigeons one morning – this was last year – and noticed that they all looked nice and healthy. Clean. Feathers tidy with a pretty iridescence around the neck. Plump, which I’m positive comes in part from constantly hoovering up pastry crumbs sprinkled city-wide; there’s a Bäckerei or Konditorei every which way you turn here. But above all, I noticed that they all had two rosy pink feet. Pigeons at home for the most part are kinda greasy and grubby – like they took a bath in a puddle of oil, and didn’t bother to groom themselves afterwards. And they are frequently hobbling around on at least one injured foot, if not simply a straight-up, tragic, stumpy pigeon peg-leg. I started wondering if all Viennese squab were in such hale and hearty condition. And it wasn’t just me; a friend who visited last year also noticed the same, this time in the courtyard of Schönbrunn (where we were eating sandwiches and dropping crumbs on the ground). Vienna is a pretty killer city, so it would make sense that the pigeons are enjoying the same high quality of living as the humans. I started taking note of pigeons around town to see if they all lived up to the standard of the Schiller Platz and Schönbrunn residents. I was hoping that I’d find a higher ratio of very fine birds, but it turns out that not only does Vienna have the same dismal specimens as other places, it shares the same attitude that pretty much the rest of the world has.

You don’t need to know any German at all to get the gist of this sign, although you may want to pay attention to the fact that you’ll receive a 36€ fine if you feed the flying rats. But no matter. I still love Vienna, maybe even more so now. It’s boring when something is too perfect. A good dose of seediness adds character. And I even like pigeons as well, despite what everyone else thinks, although I do prefer them a bit on the cleaner side.